Toni Wolff: The Self is at the same time a unique thing, a totality, and also a group.
Dear Mrs. Champernowne, Freiestrasse 15, Zurich 32 June 14th
I have time today to write you about the pictures and later on it will be rather impossible.
I am most awfully busy, and in a week we are having examinations on top of it all.
Only I don’t think I am able to add anything valuable at all.
You have already explained a great deal, as much as is possible.
With symbols, as you know, interpretation is impossible, otherwise they would not have to be symbols.
One can talk around them somewhat and add more or less parallel amplifications, but that is all.
My feeling is that the circle and the wheels are a symbol of the Self which, when it appears, seems as if coming from space.
Thee is as you said already a slight parallel to the flying saucers which really do come from an extra-terrestrial source, because no actual metal or matter or machine could stand that velocity and climb at that speed.
So one can only say that this vision or experience is as strange and as incomparable as the flying saucers are.
The problem of the wheels when they were an ornament to be worn and proved to be too full of mana, or too much charged with energy, could express the fact that the Self, as a factor and function transcending the Ego, can indeed not be put on to the Ego because the Ego is contained in it.
The two wheels which are interrelated by the chain can relate to the two aspects of the Self.
The Self is at the same time a unique thing, a totality, and also a group.
As such it can be said to have two aspects, the inner and the outer.
As the inner one, it is the many-fold factors, archetypes, figures, situations, symbols, etc . which constitute it; and as the outer it is a group of people which are an inherent part of the life of an individual.
Both aspects are interrelated.
Possibly the problem of the two levels also comes in, as one wheel is on a lower basis than the other.
One level might be the unconscious and the other the conscious one.
The Self exists always of course, but often unconsciously.
In Primitive Society, it is constituted by the group or tribe or the Totem clan.
In Egypt it is represented by the Pharaoh at least in the earlier period.
In Christianity by Christ and also by the Church, as the body of Christ.
(By Church I mean the community of all who belong to the Church, and also the Church itself with all its institutions, rituals and symbols. )
It has (two aspects also: the human orre of relatedness; and the one of ideas and forms; Eros and Logos.
Sure enough in our time there is no such expression and objectivation any more, at least not for the Protestant and for the Atheist.
So real community also is lacking and people are either isolated or herded together in masses.
It would indeed be a great achievement if a real community would live again.
But in a certain way it does with people who are in relation to the Self, because as I said, the Self is more than the Ego.
Possibly also it is particularly a woman’s task, as her ruling principle is Relatedness.
Only . she will not achieve it without the masculine principle of logos, otherwise it would be merely personal and biological.
We have the example of how it should be again in the Church: the Church is the spiritual mother, the spiritual womb, but based on and expressed by ideas.
The Self is a paradoxical symbol, as all real symbols are.
It is totality and oneness, yet man can only perceive it as duality.
Somewhat like the Chinese, that is Taoistic symbol of the Taigitu, it represents unmanifested wholeness, but in actuality there is always either Yang or Yin actually manifested.
I will return the pictures and photos either by Mrs. Allenby or by Dr. Pye.
If you come in October, don’t make it too early because I will probably be away until towards the end of the month.
I hope all goes well with you . I will soon hear details from Mrs. Allenby,
Affectionately, Toni Wolff. ~Toni Wolff, A Memoir of Toni Wolff, Page 46
